Q5 How did you attract and address your audience?

Transcript
In order to make my magazine sell, I have focused heavily on making my magazine's front cover eye catching and overall different from other magazines. In order to make it appeal to my audience I have chosen my colour scheme to be dark red, black and white as these colours are commonly associated with Rock and Heavy Metal. By using these colours, I believe that my target audience will automatically associate the dark colours with the heavy metal and rock genre as other magazines featuring the same genre also use similar colour schemes. These colours also link with the genre as most Metal band's logos and clothes feature dark colours. Metal music has a very 'I dont give a **** attitude', so my magazine must also convey this message which is what I am hoping to achieve.

My magazine covers a very large amount of bands and recent news; as demonstrated in the front cover and contents page. This allows readers to get more engrossed in the magazine and to maybe 'loose' themselves within the music world. I've also attempted to make it seem like my magazine has the most important news and the most exclusive interviews to give my magazine an advantage over the other magazines.

For my front cover I tried to make my masthead as original as possible in order to attract the browsers of the shelves. I've tried to keep my cover easily identifiable with my magazines genre. My masthead has a destructive and destroyed theme to it which fits in well with the genre heavy metal, as Heavy Metal is often associated with destruction and rebellion. I’ve also used a paint brush tool that I downloaded off the internet, the brush is uses a variety of paint splotches which once again signifies rebellion. One key feature that attracts my audience is the ‘Plus’ bar at the bottom of my front page as it says which bands are featured in my magazine. Because my audience like Heavy Metal, I have used well known metal bands such as: Iron Maiden, Asking Alexandria and Avenged Sevenfold.

My contents page features the same colours hence it still carries the theme of Rock and Heavy Metal. My layout is loosely based on the style of Kerrangs Contents page. While the page does lack in the rebellion theme, it still attracts the audience with a eye catching image of my feature band on the top left of the page. Below it I have an extreme close up of Mike Portnoy’s signature sticks which automatically grab the attention of Dream Theatre, Portnoy and even Avenged Sevenfold fans. I believe that the extreme close up on the name ‘Mike Portnoy’ on the stick is especially effective.

I have also kept the same colours for my double page spread. My feature band is in active and almost aggressive poses as they play their instruments, they are also close together which really gives them a unified look and feel. This image attracts the reader and gives them an idea of the image and style of the band. I also have three vertical bars with a red to white gradient behind each member of the band, this puts emphasise on each member o and makes sure that none of the don’t go un-noticed.t the next issue will have.